Broadway star Nick Cordero has leg amputation due to virus

FILE – In this April 10, 2014 file photo, actor Nick Cordero attends the after party for the opening night of “Bullets Over Broadway” in New York. Tony Award-nominated actor Cordero, who specialized in playing tough guys on Broadway, will have to have his right leg amputated after suffering complications from the coronavirus, his wife Amanda Koots said on Instagram, Saturday, April 18, 2020. (Photo by Brad Barket/Invision/AP, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — Tony Award-nominated actor Nick Cordero has had his his right leg amputated after suffering complications from the coronavirus, his wife says.

Amanda Kloots on Instagram wrote late Saturday that Cordero “made it out of surgery alive and is headed to his room to rest and recover.”

Cordero had been treated with blood thinners to help with clotting in his leg, but his doctors had to stop the treatment because it was causing internal bleeding.

“We took him off blood thinners but that again was going to cause some clotting in the right leg, so the right leg will be amputated today,” she said earlier Saturday.

Cordero entered the intensive care unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on March 31 and has been on a ventilator and unconscious after contracting COVID-19.

His wife has been sending him daily videos of her and their 10-month-old son, Elvis, so he could see them when he woke up, and urging friends and fans to join a daily sing-a-long. A GoFundMe fundraiser has raised over $200,000.

Cordero played a mob soldier with a flair for the dramatic in 2014 in Broadway’s Woody Allen 1994 film adaptation of “Bullets Over Broadway,” for which he received a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical. He moved to Los Angeles to star in “Rock of Ages.”

The lanky Cordero originated the menacing role of husband Earl opposite his estranged wife, played by Jessie Mueller, in “Waitress” on Broadway, as well as the role of Sonny in Chazz Palminteri’s “A Bronx Tale.”

On the small screen, Cordero appeared in several episodes of “Blue Bloods” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” as well as “Lilyhammer” and he had a role in the film “Going in Style.”

The virus has sickened other Broadway veterans, including the actors Danny Burstein, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Gavin Creel, Aaron Tveit and Laura Bell Bundy as well as composer David Bryan. It has also claimed the life of Tony-winning playwright Terrence McNally.

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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

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